Theatre review: The Secret River

While Peter Gynt has a stint up at the Edinburgh Festival the National does a straight swap, with the Sydney Theatre Company’s visiting production of The Secret River coming to the Olivier for a couple of weeks’ run (minus its narrator Ningali Lawford-Wolf, who died suddenly during the Edinburgh run; Pauline Whyman has been flown over to read in the role.) Andrew Bovell’s play adapts Kate Grenville’s novel about the bloody origin story of modern Australia, one that mirrors the treatment of the Native Americans but is arguably less well-known internationally. William Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) has had his death sentence for theft commuted to transportation, and his wife Sal (Georgia Adamson) and sons have followed him to Australia. Once his sentence is up, Sal wants them to go straight back to London but William asks her to wait five years so they can build up enough money through farming to return in more comfort than they left.

Theatre review: The Judas Kiss

"Why on earth did you do it?" One of the programme notes, written by his grandson Merlin Holland, asks one of the biggest questions about the trials of Oscar Wilde: He instigated the whole thing with a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry's accusation of being a "somdomite" (sic) knowing all along it was not only true but easily proved. This is one of the two main questions tackled by David Hare in his play The Judas Kiss, which is revived by Neil Armfield at Hampstead Theatre prior to a tour. The second central mystery concerns the other man at the centre of the trials, the Marquess' son Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas: Why did Wilde not only keep coming back to, but willingly allow his life to be ruined because of a young man who (in Hare's interpretation at least) seems to have had no redeeming features whatsoever?